Classical Conversations to open new online store

Southern Pines, North Carolina—Classical Conversations, Inc.®, the world’s largest resource for classical homeschoolers, will roll out a brand-new, online store in the coming weeks, designed to improve its customers’ shopping experience, according to CEO Robert Bortins.

The IT techs at Classical Conversations have been working for months with Shopify to bring CC families the very best possible online shopping experience. Shopify is the leading cloud-based, commerce platform and currently powers over 325,000 businesses in approximately 150 countries and is trusted by brands such as Tesla Motors, Red Bull, Nestle, General Electric and the Los Angeles Lakers.

“We want to provide our families with the very best shopping experience possible,” Bortins said. “We strive for excellence in all facets of our programs and we teach excellence to our children, so we didn’t want anything less when it came to an online shopping experience. After extensive research we determined that Shopify was the right partner to help us offer an excellent shopping experience.”

While the new online store will continue to focus on books and other curricula for CC programs, it will greatly improve the store’s ability to share a wide variety of other products with its customers, according to Operations Manager Dan Griffin. The new bookstore will also fully integrate with CC’s Acumatica business system so that customer information and customer orders will flow directly between the bookstore website and CC business systems. This will allow faster and more accurate order processing.

In the future, all CC store customers will have their order history visible to them online and will allow them to order from a “profile” instead of having to enter personal data each time they place an order.

“When I visit a store I want to be in and out, but I want to have the option to gather information if I so choose,” said Chris Skinner, CC’s Shopify bookstore manager. “When my girlfriend visits a store, she wants to shop all day while viewing everything there is to view. Our new store will satisfy both types of customers with ease, creating a useful and efficient experience for all.”

Skinner’s goal in designing the new bookstore was to create a clean, easy shopping experience for CC families. The site will be well organized and easy to navigate which will decrease the number of clicks necessary to fill the shopper’s cart.

Classical Conversations® is a classical education resource used by homeschoolers in all 50 states and 15 foreign countries. CC now has more than 103,000 students enrolled in its tutoring programs, which are provided by more than 2,300 CC communities. CC provides resources, guidance and a community for a Christian home school curriculum using classical education in three developmental stages: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric.

Leigh Bortins started Classical Conversations in 1997. The family-owned company is headquartered in Southern Pines, North Carolina. For more information, visit www.classicalconversations.com.

About the Author

John Carpenter

John has been Classical Conversations’ communication journalist for four years, specializing in media relations and internal and external communications. He taught journalism and communication at a Christian college for 15 years and holds a master’s degree in Communications from the University of Tennessee. Before moving to higher education, he served 19 years as editor of the community newspaper in Dayton, Tennessee. He and his wife, Karin, an Academic Advisor for CC, have raised and homeschooled their four children together and have one granddaughter. They live on a 19-acre hobby farm with two dogs and a cat.